The National Interest - A democratic empire?

By the end of Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution in America was
under full steam. And as the country redefined itself—from rural
and agricultural to urban and industrial—it similarly redefined its
national interest. Or tried to. Many Americans interpreted the shift from
agriculture to industry as indicating that territory per se no longer
mattered; America's expansionist impulses—which none denied
still existed—should look to markets rather than land. Yet others
contended that land still counted. They observed the overseas empires of
the other great powers and judged that American greatness would be
measured by the same material yardstick. Moreover, enough of the spirit of
manifest destiny survived the Civil War (the Union victory did wonders for
the self-confidence of the winners) to support a sense that American
institutions and values could revivify a weary and corrupted world.

After fighting broke out in Cuba in 1895 between Cuban nationalists and
Spanish loyalists, Americans sided with the nationalists: first
sentimentally, then politically, and finally militarily. The American war
party—led by Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge
and journalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph
Hearst—included individuals who dreamed of an American empire akin
to the empires of Britain, France, and Germany. But what won William
McKinley his war declaration against Spain in April 1898 was a feeling
that America had an obligation to prevent atrocities in its own backyard.
(It was during the 1890s that the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, asserting
American primacy in the Western Hemisphere, achieved the status of an
enforceable national interest.) When congressional skeptics of the
McKinley administration's motives, led by Henry Teller, attached to
the war resolution an amendment forswearing American ownership of Cuba,
the amendment sailed through the Senate without debate.

But wars have a way of altering reality, and after American forces
captured Manila, the urge to empire took a different tack. McKinley
negotiated a treaty with Spain granting Cuba independence but transferring
the Philippines to the United States. The president claimed that
Providence told him his country had an obligation to uplift and
Christianize the Filipinos. (Obviously, it was a Protestant Providence, as
most Filipinos were already Christians—but Roman Catholics.)

When McKinley laid the treaty before the Senate for ratification, the
country witnessed one of the most distilled debates in American history on
the nature of the national interest. The imperialists asserted that
annexation of the Philippines would benefit the United States economically
(by providing a stepping-stone to the markets of Asia), diplomatically (by
anteing America into the imperial sweepstakes that dominated international
affairs), and militarily (by providing naval bases and coaling stations
for the U.S. fleet). Beyond this, American control of the Philippines
would advance the interests of world civilization. "It is
elemental," Albert Beveridge told his Senate colleagues. "It
is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic
peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle
self-contemplation and self-admiration…. He has made us the master
organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has
given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction
throughout the earth."

The anti-imperialists construed the national interest quite differently. A
radical few denied that God had any special plan for America, but others
simply held that American exceptionalism worked better by example than by
force. Indeed, to ape the European imperialists would undermine all that
made America unique and worth emulating. Carl Schurz, a refugee republican
from Prussia after the failed revolution of 1848 there, and a Lincoln
Republican in the American Civil War, predicted that annexation would
embroil the United States in an imperial conflict like those that ate the
blood and treasure of the other imperial powers. "The Filipinos
fought against Spain for their freedom and independence, and unless they
abandon their recently proclaimed purpose for their freedom and
independence, they will fight us," Schurz said. The imperial road
would lead his adopted country into dire peril. "The character and
future of the Republic and the welfare of its people now living and yet to
be born are in unprecedented jeopardy."

The imperialists won the battle but lost the war. Even as the Senate
(narrowly) accepted McKinley's treaty, Filipino nationalists
launched the war of independence Schurz predicted. The American war in the
Philippines was the long, dirty antithesis of the short, clean American
war in Cuba. Americans committed (and suffered) atrocities like those they
had castigated Spain for committing against Cuba; the whole experience
soured the American people on empire. By the time U.S. forces finally
suppressed the Philippine insurgency, Americans had discovered that their
national interest did not include empire. They needed another four decades
to divest themselves of the Philippines (Puerto Rico, which did not want
to be divested, remained American), but they were never tempted to repeat
the imperial experiment.